Posts Tagged ‘Russia’

This is the final post in this series. Unfortunately, Hayden does not come to any real conclusions at the end of “The Assault on Intelligence: American Security in an Age of Lies.” He just rambles on and on. As a career intelligence professional, one could expect better. He has made a career of dealing with large amounts of data of varying amounts of credibility, and has come to conclusions, or at least different possible outcomes weighted differently. But he didn’t. So please tolerate HM’s offerings.

The president has already tweeted that the entire Department of Justice is the deep state. He has also told a New York Times reporter, “I have an absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department. Two conclusions can be drawn here.
Trump is woefully ignorant of the Constitution and what he can do.
The Russian new way of conducting warfare has been highly successfully.

Should the Democrats win back the House and the Senate, Trump can be impeached and removed from office.
However, this is a goal that it is difficult to achieve. And likely impossible given Russian interference, which has been promised, but for which Trump is going to do nothing to prevent.

Mueller can finish his report and provide it to Congress. It is likely that Republicans would not be impressed by compelling evidence of obstruction of justice.

But what about conspiring with Russia to win the election? The United States has spent large amounts on defense. But to what end if the Russians have effectively captured the White House? Trump worships Putin and would gladly serve as his lap dog.

And suppose it is discovered that Trump owes large amounts of money to Russia and that Putin effectively owns him?

What happens in these latter two cases rests solely with the Republicans. Too many Republicans have been influenced by Russia’s new form of warfare and are doing everything they can to subvert Mueller’s work. They have already produced a biased report that excludes Democratic input and exonerates the president.

Similarly, if Trump fires Mueller and tries to close down the investigation, the question is how will Republicans respond to this constitutional crisis? If they’re complacent and do nothing, our democracy effectively goes down the drain. Trump is likely to declare himself President for life, and Russia would effectively occupy the oval office.

The Russians are generations ahead of the United States in warfare. If this were an old-fashioned shooting war, all Americans would be enraged and the country would be up in arms. But the type of highly effective warfare to which the Russians have advanced involves the human mind. Some US Citizens are loosing interest in Mueller’s investigation and are tired of it lasting so long. They seem to care not that they would be losing the White House to the Russians. All this requires thinking, that is System 2 processing. System 1 processing, feeling, believing, not thinking and being oblivious of the truth is so much easier.

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in “The Assault on Intelligence: American Security in an Age of Lies.” This book is by Michael V. Hayden who has served as the directors of both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This is the second post in the series.

in 2017 a detailed story in “Wired” magazine revealed how Russia was subverting U.S. democracy cited a European study that found that rather than trying to change minds, the Russian goal was simply “to destroy and undermine confidence in Western media.” The Russians found a powerful ally in Trump, who attacked American institutions with as much ferocity as did Russian propaganda, as when he identified the press as the “enemy of the American people.” The attack on the media rarely argued facts. James Poniewozik of the New York Times wrote in a 2017 tweet that Trump didn’t try to argue the facts of a case—“just that there is no truth, so you should just follow your gut & your tribe.”

Wired also pointed out the convergence between the themes of Russian media/web blitz and the Trump campaign: Clinton’s emails, Clinton’s health, rigged elections, Bernie Sanders, and so forth. And then there was an echo chamber between Russian news and American right-wing outlets, epitomized by Clinton staffer Seth Rich was somehow related to the theft of DNC emails, and the dumping of them on Wikileaks—that it was an inside job and not connected to Russia at all.

Hayden writes, “Trump seemed the perfect candidate for the Russians’ purpose, and that was ultimately our choice not theirs. But the central fact to be faced and understood here is that Russians have gotten very good indeed at invading and often dominating the American information space. For me, that story goes back twenty years. I arrived in San Antonia, TX, in January 1996 to take command of what was then called the Air Intelligence Agency. As I’ve written elsewhere, Air Force Intelligence was on the cutting edge of thinking about the new cyber warfare, and I owed special thanks to my staff there for teaching me so much about this new battle space.”

“The initial question they asked was whether we were in the cyber business or the information dominance business? Did we want to master cyber networks as a tool of war or influence or were we more ambitious, with an intent to shape how adversaries or even societies received and processed all information? As we now have a Cyber Command and not an information dominance command, you can figure how all this turned out. We opted for cyber; Russia opted for information dominance.”

The Russian most interested in that capacity was General Valery Gerasimov, an armor officer who after combat in the Second Chechen War, served as the commander of the Leningrad and then Moscow military districts. Writing in 2013 Gerasimov pointed to the “blurring [of] the lines between the state of war and the state of peace” and—after noting the Arab Awakening—observed that “a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict…and sink into a web of chaos.”

Gerasimov continued, “The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown,” and the trend now was “the broad use of political, economic, informational humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures—applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population.” He said seeing large clashes of men and metal as a “thing” of the past.” He called for “long distance, contactless actions against the enemy” and included in his arsenal “informational actions, devices, and means.” He concluded, “The information space opens wide asymmetrical possibilities for reducing the fighting potential of the enemy,” and so new “models of operations and military conduct” were needed.

Putin appointed Gerasimov chief of the general staff in late 2012. Fifteen months later there was evidence of his doctrine in action with the Russian annexation of Crimea and occupation of parts of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

Hayden writes, “In eastern Ukraine, Russia promoted the fiction of a spontaneous rebellion by local Russian speakers against a neofascist regime in Kiev, aided only by Russian volunteers, a story line played out in clever high quality broadcasts from news services like RT and Sputnik coupled with relentless trolling on social media. [At this time HM was able to view these RT telecasts at work. They were the best done propaganda pieces he’s ever seen, because they did not appear to be propaganda, but rather, high quality, objective newscasts.]

Hayden concludes, “With no bands, banners, or insignia, Russia had altered borders within Europe—by force—but with an informational canopy so dense as to make the aggression opaque.”

The Dunning-Kruger Effect describes the phenomenon of people thinking they know much more about a topic than they actually know, compared to the knowledgeable individual who is painfully aware of how much he still doesn’t know about the topic in question.

Donald Trump provides an interesting case of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Many times he has expounded on how much he knows. He knows more than the generals about the military, he knows more than John McCain about being a prisoner of war, in fact he does not like prisoners who were captured, and on and on and on. It is clear that he thinks he knows more about the law than his lawyers do. He has also claimed to be the only one who knows how to solve our problems.

But in fact, he is woefully ignorant. He publicly asked the Russians for Hillary’s emails to aid his campaign. Apparently, he did not know that foreign powers were to play no role in American elections. He keeps claiming that there was no collusion. But here he was in public asking for collusion and the Russians obviously complied.

It is also clear that he could not pass an 8th grade civics test. He did not, or probably still does no know, that the three branches of government, Executive, Legislative, and Judicial are independent. He said on television that he wanted to get rid of Comey as the FBI Director because he was afraid of what he might do. Moreover, he boasted about getting rid of Comey to the Russians. Yet he continues to regard himself and describe himself as a genius.

Then you have Trump’s supporters. They do not like knowledgeable individuals, which they contemptuously call they elite. They are fearful of these individuals as being some conspiratorial dark force (the deep state). And many, if not most, of these people embrace Trump as their savior. In fact they are colluding entities in a very large Dunning-Kruger Effect.

So who are the victims? All Americans, but only some are deserving victims. The rest of us are collateral damage. Another victim, not to be overlooked, is democracy.

There have been twelve posts on “The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High Tech World” that documented the adverse affects of technology. There was an additional post demonstrating that just the presence of a Smartphone can be disruptive. The immediately preceding post documented the costs of social media per se. First of all they have disruptive effects on lives and minds. And these disruptive effects degrade your mind, which the blog posts documented affect many aspects of your life, including education. Hence the title of this blog post.

Unfortunately, social media make social demands. So removing yourself from social media is something that needs to be explained to your friends, whom you should let know you’ll still be willing to communicate via email. Review with them the reason for your decision. Cite the relevant research presented in this blog and elsewhere. Point out that Facebook not only has an adverse impact on cognition, it was also a tool used by Russia to influence our elections. Facebook accepted rubles to influence the US Presidential election. The magnitude of this intervention has yet to be determined. For patriotic reasons alone, Facebook should be ditched. You are also taking these steps to reclaim control of your attentional resources and to build a healthy memory.

Carefully consider what steps you need to take. Heavy users become nervous when they are not answering alerts. One can gradually increase the increments in answering alerts. However, going cold turkey and simply turning off alerts might be more painful initially, but it would free you from the compulsion to answer alerts earlier should you of cold turkey. It would also make your behavior clearer to your friends earlier rather than later. Similarly you can only answer text messages and phone calls at designated. Voice mail assures you won’t miss anything.

If asked by a prospective employer or university as to why you are not on Facebook, explain that you want to make the most of your cognitive potential and that Facebook detracts from this objective. Cite the research. You can develop a web presence by having your own website that you would control. Here you could attach supporting materials as you deem fit.

Doing this should make you stand out over any other candidates who might be competing with you (unless they were also following the advice of this blog). If your reviewer is not impressed, you should conclude that he is not worthy of you and that affiliating with them would be a big mistake. Hold to this conclusion regardless of the reputation of the school or employer.

HM attended the very first meeting of the APS. Time really does fly. HM has attended many more meetings since then, and he has become quite proficient at attending these programs. At one time it was common for there to be published proceedings of these meetings. For large meetings one would have several large books to schlep around. Then a transition was made to putting the printed programs on CDs.

However, today the norm has been for there to be no printed records, so one has to try to attend the presentations that are of interest. Unfortunately, it is not unusual for there to be multiple programs of interest at the same time, and a choice has to be made as to which one to attend. Most speakers use slides, and all to often, these slides cannot be read by everyone in the room. Speakers are given an alloted time for their presentations. HM has been a speaker and must confess to making the same mistakes. The primary concern is getting through the presentation in the alloted amount of time. HM used to plan for his presentation to be well within the allotted time, because speakers do go over time with the result of squeezing the remaining speakers of their alloted time. But still HM thinks that most of us do not pace the presentation properly. We do not allow sufficient time for the listeners to think about and process our presentations. And frequently there is insufficient time to take proper notes. The speaker is already on to the next slide before the main points of the preceding slide can be adequately captured. This is HM’s excuse for not adequately summarizing these presentations in his posts. Plus these meetings are mentally exhausting.

This time the exhaustion is even greater due to all the investigations taking place. Watergate took place while HM was a graduate student. That was a time of critical importance for the United States. The current problem portends a much greater importance.

It is already clear that Russia did disrupt the 2016 presidential election. The open questions are whether they stole the election, whether there was collusion between the campaign and the Russians, and financial matters that could have contributed to the problem.

During the election it was disturbing to learn that Trump idolized Putin. Putin worked his way up as a KGB agent and used his skills to become the de facto leader of a kleptocracy. How can a US president idolize such a man? It is doubtful that anyone expressing admiration of a Soviet or Russian leader could ever have gotten a security clearance much less be elected President of the United States.

We learn that a War Room is being set up. A War against what? the truth? It should be understood that given the conclusion that Russia did hack America, it is obligatory that an investigation to undertaken to assess whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. These investigations are not the result of the press or of leakers. Investigations must be done. There are also financial investigations that must be done and they have just begun. It is imperative that we know whether there are any financial dealings resulting in compromises in the Trump administration. This will take some time. All of this could be done more efficiently with the cooperation of Trump. War rooms and tweeter attacks are counterproductive.

There is a good book by Malcolm Nance titled “THE PLOT TO HACK AMERICA: How Putin’s Cyberspies and Wikileaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election.” This book provides an enormous amount of information that can help us follow the current investigations.

Nevertheless, following these investigations on top of the normal fatigue from attending a scientific meeting will likely slow down my blogging about the conference.

The title of this post is identical to a front page story by Craig Timberg in the 25 November 2016 issue of the Washington Post. The article begins, “The flood of ‘fake news’ this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump, and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.”

The article continues, “Russia’s increasingly sophisticated machinery—including thousands of bonnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts—echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with the nuclear-armed Russia.”

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment. The sophistication of these Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news.”

Research was done by Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute has been tracking Russian propaganda since 2014 along with two other researchers,s Andrew Weisburg and J.M. Berger. This research can be found at warontherocks.com, “Trolling for Trump: How Russia is Trying to Destroy our Democracy.”

Another group, PropOrNot, http://www.propornot.com/
plans to release its own findings today showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns.

Here are some tips for identifying fake news:

Examine the url, which sometimes are subtly changed.
Does the photo looked photoshopped or unrealistic (drop into Google images)
Cross check with other news sources.
Think about installing Chrome plug-ins to identify bad stuff.